soup in my fly

Scientists (social, natural and the like) stretch for meaning with anything. It's what they are supposed to do mind you, but especially with social scientists they tend to get things wrong with that stretch for meaning with two totally different things.

Here's my attempt to be wrong.

Max was the son of Sweat-Pea and Bogey.

He was a happy go lucky type of dog. Sweat-Pea was more the cuddler and Bogey... well he was mean. He wasn't always mean, he was always a bit skiddish but he was basically non-mean. Until he choked on a piece of cheese. He almost died and that changed his demenor a tad. He was still Bogey, but now he was skiddish with mean. I guess almost choking does that to beings.

Max got beat up by his old man until he was one or two. Even after he outweighed Boggy (because Max was in a litter of one) and was an inch or two taller still Bogey would terrorize Max mercilessly. Until Max thought to himself, hey I'm bigger than Bogey - I'll just beat him up for a change. This went on until Max died. Bogey always seemed to be the aggressor. Bogey has mellowed out considerably since his sons death, but I guess having no one to growl at continuously sort of makes beings seem more controlled. Makes me think Bogey's meanness was all a dominance game (that he almost always lost).

What does that have to do with politics?

This is where I stretch. The United States is Bogey. Always growling and getting into fights it can't possibly win. Can it win? Sure, but it lacks the basic knowledge (or care) of how to win the fight. It will never learn that you need to temper your response to the situation so that you come out ahead and the other party comes out ahead.

Anyhow, Max was a great dog. I still go out into the garage expecting to have him jump on me and lick my face for what seemed like forever. I never got that with Sweat-pea or Bogey. He will be missed greatly in my heart.

And with that I'm going to leave the web for a month to get my orders straightened out. I have been spinning my wheels on the internet for way to long. I'll start posting more regularly when I come back. Probably not.

Technorati Tags: Dogs, Politics

I've started to become more proactive in hunting for people on the internet.

My Trillian contact lists once stood as a shining beacon of wasteable time, now sits as a withered remnant for its once former glory. So not to bog down this entry with a bunch of needless facts I'll just say around 2004 I stopped adding people. I stopped looking for people. My list wasn't that populated either, I had about 20 people to which 8 or 9 I spoke regularly.

As the years wore on I deleted the people who were never on line anymore and the contact lists grew smaller and smaller until this year only 3 people remained. A friend from uni that I talk to once a month, a girl from round' abouts Chicago that rarely comes on anymore, and a girl from England a started talking to before I went over there on my Cambridge excursion.

Bogged.

The only problem is every instant message service has a crappy search for feature. I've found a few unaffiliated sites that have searches that are better, but you have to join.

The ICQ (my first messager, and has been unpopulated the longest) is probably the best one - but either it's bogged down by spammers or most of the people aren't there. AIM and MSN you can search, but there is no online/offline option and they are pretty much clusterfucks (AIM being the better of the two). And Yahoo. It says there is a look up area, but there isn't a lookup area. You are pretty much better off just looking in the other three.

So, does anyone know any good search engines for IMers?

Technorati Tags: IM

That is a bit misleading. I read all the time. I read websites and articles and school textbooks (sometimes). The greater brunt of my reading comes from the web.

I don't read books. That's better. There is no reason for me not to read books. In fact I should have learned four languages, how to play the piano, draw like Leonardo and look like Brock Samson by now with the abundance of free time I have (and a few other things, like now I'm "in" to calligraphy).

But I don't.

I renewed interest in getting books from the library and not reading them... the two books I've checked out the most and I would like to read are Catch-22 and Don Quixote.

One day.

I have done something though. Something most commonly unlike me. I've read a book. In 2004ish I started reading Wil Wheaton's temp website and I saw that he put a out a few books that I wanted to read - Just a Geek in particular. I didn't want to buy it and I couldn't find a torrent of it so I went to the original warez site, the library. No dice. It was probably in one of the state wide catalogs, but I didn't have the patience to look though all of them.

So there it sat in my personal want to read list. Until a month ago.

I joined the city library because I thought (and they were) they would have access to more books. I've put orders out for a lot of books, Ancient Greek, Latin, webcomics, bunch of others. I remembered that I'd wanted Just a Geek and low and behold there it was in some other library. Needless to say I also checked my old library, andtheyhaditsoicheckeditoutthereinstead.

I had a lot of books to be read and I wasn't reading them. Last week rolls up and I start reading. It took until yesterday to finish, but I am proud of myself. One down...

... oh, the book sort of sucked.

Technorati Tags: Book, Reading

The 2008 elections are shaping up to be a huge let-down for the Democrats.

In 2004 even though the historic precedent sided against the Democrats they felt they could take the presidency. Bush was unpopular and the Congress wasn't accomplishing much. The left-wing blogs were abuzz with the Democrats chance to take back the White House. We all know how that ended.

Fast-forward to now.

The Democrats have a historic chance to sweep into the Congress (more-so than they did in 2006) and Bush is as unpopular as ever with approval ratings being south of 50% for much of his second term. Left-leaning blogs are abuzz with Obama's message of "change" and McCain's inability to distance himself from Bush's failed policies.

Even with all of the "indicators" showing that this election season will be monumental for the Democrats, I plead with them and the left leaning blogs to err on the side of caution. We've been down this road before and it promises to be every bit as ugly as 2000 and 2004.

Indicators like polls. Around this time in the 2004 elections Kerry was up 5-8 points in the national polling. Gore was actually down in the days leading up to the 2000 election. Polls are a decent indicator of what is happening at that moment. A snapshot of time. Between now and election day though, they are pretty much worthless to anyone involved in a campaign.

Aura of inevitability.

People, blogs, whoever will say they aren't saying their candidate/party will win in 2008. But, they are in the very fact that "glow" about their candidates positives and dwell on the other candidates negatives. The smaller blogs I can see, but the bigger blogs (Powerline, DailyKos, Huffington Post, Drudge Report - to name a few) I believe have a duty to call it down the middle. Not go for the common lowest denominator. They don't have to run towards the center, they just have to be fair in their reporting/editorializing.

Why Al Franken is looked over and Ann Coulter is demonized in books is not because of their politics. It's because Coulter makes things up and Franken (usually) fact checks. Extensively.

I just ask, please, don't get ahead of yourselves in naming a president either directly or indirectly before hand.

You never know who will be president-elect November 5th.

I need to set up my hotlink again. Yay.